Looking for a Semrush alternative?
Semrush is the best known SEO suite there is, and its Site Audit will crawl a hundred thousand pages a month looking for technical faults. It finds broken links, redirect chains, missing tags and pages the crawlers cannot reach, and it does that at a scale we do not attempt. Then it hands you a list ranked by severity. Severity is a measure of how broken something is. It is not a measure of what it is costing you, and on a small site those are rarely the same list.
Semrush and you x you i, side by side
| Feature | you x you i ResearchPublished research and standards, your real page, and your real search data | Semrush Real dataTheir own crawl of the web, at large scale |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions More of your visitors buy | ||
| Tells you why people are not buying | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your headline says what you sell | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your buttons and calls to action | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your pricing is laid out clearly | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks how your pages are laid out | Measured | Not checked |
| Findability More visitors arrive and more of them buy | ||
| Checks the Google basics | Checks | Checks |
| Checks AI can read and quote your pages | Checks | Not checked |
| Connects to Google Search Console | Checks | Checks |
| Backlink and keyword research | Not checked | Checks |
| Technical health More visitors arrive, more of them buy and more people can use your site | ||
| Checks how fast your pages load | Measured | Measured |
| Checks it works on phones | Checks | Checks |
| Checks people with disabilities can use it | Measured | MeasuredSeparate app |
| Trust and brand More visitors trust what they see | ||
| Checks your site looks trustworthy | Checks | Not checked |
| Checks your brand is consistent | Measured | Not checked |
| Predicts where visitors look first | Measured | Not checked |
| Clarity More of your visitors buy | ||
| Checks how hard the page is to take in | Checks | Not checked |
| How it works How each tool is run and priced, and what its scores rest on | ||
| Results in minutes, no traffic needed | ||
| One audit, no subscription | ||
| Pricing | $5 per audit, no subscription required | From $139/mo |
The scoring behind your audit is state of the art: more than a dozen machine-learning models, several built on research published in the last two years, benchmarked on held-out data and calibrated to how thousands of real people rated thousands of real web pages. No other audit at this price grades a site this way.
Grounded in research and web standards
- WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard
- Google Core Web Vitals performance standard
- Usability research usability principles
- Web-credibility research trust
- Eye-tracking research visual attention
- Readability research clarity
- Colour science brand consistency
When to choose Semrush
Choose Semrush when you are running SEO as a discipline. If you need keyword research, rank tracking across hundreds of terms, competitor backlink analysis, and a crawler that covers every page of a large site every week, that is what it is built for and we do not compete with it. It is also the right answer if you look after many sites: one subscription covers them all, where we charge per audit.
When to choose you x you i
Choose us when you have one site, a handful of pages that matter, and you want to know what to change on Monday. We read the page a customer actually lands on and tell you what is losing the sale: whether the headline says what you sell, whether the pricing is clear, whether it looks trustworthy, where the eye goes first, what is slow, what breaks on a phone. Ordered by what it is worth fixing, in plain English, with the wording to use. There is no subscription here: $5 buys one audit, and you run another when you want one.
What we check that Semrush does not
Every one of these is a row in the table above, ticked in our column and blank in theirs.
- Tells you why people are not buying
- Checks your headline says what you sell
- Checks your buttons and calls to action
- Checks your pricing is laid out clearly
- Checks how your pages are laid out
- Checks AI can read and quote your pages
- Links your fixes to your Google traffic
- Shows what AI answers cost you in clicks
- Tracks your score against your Google traffic
- Checks your site looks trustworthy
- Checks your brand is consistent
- Predicts where visitors look first
- Flags copy that sounds AI-written
- Checks how hard the page is to take in
- Emails you what your fixes did, 30 days on
- Scores measured against what real people said, not an opinion
- One audit, no subscription
What a year costs
Same year, both tools, list prices only.
- Semrush SEO, $139 a month
- $1,668a year
- you x you i $5 an audit, 12 audits, one a month
- $60a year
- Difference over a year
- $1,608
And you only pay for the audits you run. One audit is $5, paid once, so a year of monthly checks is a ceiling and not a bill. A subscription is the other way round: you pay it whether you look at it that month or not.
The two tools do different jobs, and the table above says which. This is only what each one asks for.
Semrush list price read from semrush.com on 9 August 2026. Prices change; this one is checked by hand.
Semrush vs you x you i: common questions
Semrush already audits my site. Why would I need this?
Because you are being told different things. Semrush Site Audit reports technical health: what is broken, missing or unreachable, ranked by severity. We report what a visitor experiences and what it costs you: the headline that does not say what you sell, the price nobody can find, the form that is too long. A site can pass a technical audit and still lose every visitor on the first screen.
Is this cheaper than Semrush?
It is a different shape. Semrush starts at $139 a month whether or not you use it that month. We charge $5 for an audit, so if you check your site twice a year you pay for two audits. If you need rank tracking and keyword research every week, Semrush earns its subscription and we do not replace it.
Do you crawl my whole site like Semrush does?
No, and that is deliberate. Semrush will crawl a hundred thousand pages a month. We read the pages that decide whether someone buys, closely, and a deep read of your homepage and product page is worth more to a small business than a shallow pass over every page you have.
Do you do keyword research or backlinks?
No. Semrush owns keyword volumes, rank tracking and link research, and we do not attempt any of it. Our SEO checks stop at whether search engines and AI assistants can read the page at all. Keep Semrush for the discipline; use us for the page.
What is the audit based on?
Our own machine-learning models, each tuned on hundreds of real business pages and checked against the web standards professionals use for speed, accessibility, readability, and brand. Where a single-purpose tool checks one slice of your site, every score here comes from published research and is ranked by what actually moves visitors.